


Perfectly Normal, Thank You Very Much

by jessitiz



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Don't you love when you get assigned fanfic for homework, F/M, I can't tag anything without spoiling what do I do, I got an A btw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 22:15:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8915038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessitiz/pseuds/jessitiz
Summary: Muggleborn Andrea Roth elects to avoid magic after her move to the UK during Voldemort's second rein of terror. Years after that mess has been cleaned up, with 3 kids and Muggle in-laws, she gets to explain how these strange things keep happening around her triplets.





	

Andrea Roth’s move from New York to London hadn’t technically been illegal. It hadn’t even been unusual.  Her passport was processed, she found a job that her visa allowed her to hold, and shortly after she married the son of one of the directors at the firm where she worked as a receptionist, she applied for citizenship. The authorities on both sides of the pond, if asked about her, would have first responded, “Why do you want to check,” and then, “There is absolutely nothing questionable about Ms. Roth’s status.” The authorities had no problem with her.

The Muggle authorities, anyway. The Ministry of Magic might be upset that she had entered the country and hadn’t registered with them.

Her move happened shortly after Voldemort’s second rise to power, and as a Muggleborn wizard, Andrea decided that it wasn’t worth getting involved with the political upheaval. She had been raised by Muggles anyway. As long as she didn’t use magic, Britain's Wizards would have no idea to even start looking for her. And after marrying her Muggle husband, she saw no reason too anyway. So Andrea lived in a nice house with her husband and in-laws, three perfectly normal muggles who had absolutely no idea magic existed.

\-----------------------------------

One bright sunny day in the middle of the summer saw two eleven-year-old girls sitting at the kitchen table. The table was covered entirely in old newspapers. On top of the protective coating there were several bottles and tubes of paints and several cups of water and nearly a hundred brushes. It was an amateur artist’s dream.

Neither of the girls were artists.

“But, Granny!!” One girl, Mia, complained, nearly standing in her chair in her attempt to convince her grandmother that she did not want to paint. The other girl, Emma, stared at the blank paper in front of her, her face resolute. 

The girls’ grandmother huffed around in the kitchen, picking up keys and organizing papers and checking for her wallet in her purse as she bustled around the kitchen.

“One afternoon of painting won’t hurt you,” the grandmother said, the words punctuated by the clanging of her keys as she picked them up for the third time in the last half-minute. The words were stern, but distracted.

Mia clearly wanted her Granny’s full attention, because her voice rose a half-octave higher and she gestured wildly at the open window. “But we wanna go outside.”

“Why don’t you paint a tree? Then you would be bringing the outside inside.”

“Because that’s not the same as going outside,” Mia puffed indignantly, as if she were ashamed that her Granny didn’t know that already. 

“Come now, please. I’ve already set the paints up for the both of you.” She stopped rustling through her things and put her hands on her hips. She scowled at the girls. “Honestly, painting is so much more ladylike than going off on little adventures and bringing back frogs, how--”

Andrea slipped into the kitchen, earning her the same scowl that had been directed at the girls. She glanced at the clock, “Aren’t you going to be late?”

Andrea’s mother-in-law looked at the clock, and her face shifted from sharp to just general distaste. “Yes, yes I am.” She suddenly smiled. She walked to both of the girls’ spots on the table and pulled them into hugs, which neither of them enjoyed if their faces were any indication. She kissed them both on the cheeks. “Emma, Mia, be good. Paint me a picture?”

Neither Mia nor Emma responded, but she took this to mean she had won and hurried past Andrea into the area by the front door. She turned to Andrea to give her a brief  “I’ll see you at nine,” and then she was gone.

The chorus of complaints immediately tripled. Emma groaned and leaned back in her chair as Mia turned her desperate attempts to get out of painting to the last adult in the room.

“Mom, we don’t wanna!”

“I know,” Andrea smiled at them. She hummed as she crossed her arms. She didn’t want to force her girls to paint when they clearly didn’t want to. But if they didn’t paint, or rather, if she didn’t make them paint, her mother-in-law would just guilt trip them all for the next three days.

The room was silent for a moment. Emma picked up a paintbrush and quietly asked, “If we paint a picture, can we go outside?”

Andrea clapped her hands together, her smile growing brighter. “Yes, that seems like a fair trade.” She glanced at the clock. 1:12pm. “How about you guys work on one painting until 1:30, and then you can go outside. You can show your paintings to Granny when you get back.”

Emma seemed satisfied with this and set to work, dolloping some paint from the center of the table onto her paper. Mia looked like she was going to complain some more, but she was interrupted.

“What’s going on?”

Andrea looked behind her. Lucas, the last of her rogue 11 year olds, had snuck downstairs during all the commotion before their Granny left. When he saw the table covered in paints, his face broke into a huge smile, and he ran a hand through his hair as he started to bounce on his heels.

“Your sisters are painting,” Andrea said.

“Can I paint too?” Lucas asked, turning to face her a bit too fast and almost falling over. Andrea reached out to ruffle his hair as she pushed him in the direction of the table.

“Of course!”

Lucas nearly jumped across the kitchen and climbed into his chair. He started carefully moving some of the paints around, making a space to work. Emma quickly globbed some more great spots of paint onto her paper with her brush, a small smile working its way onto her face. While Mia stopped openly protesting the exercise, she crossed her arms and glared angrily at the paper, her face all scrunched up.

As Lucas reached for the bottle of blue paint, Mia sneezed. The loose paint from Emma’s work, the great spots that their grandmother had placed on the palate, and even some paint from inside the bottles sprayed out in a magnificent burst of color. Everything in the kitchen, from the new stove, to the decades old wallpaper, to all four very confused people in the room are completely splattered in paint.

“What on earth was that?”

All five people.

Andrea turned to her husband, who had walked into the doorframe just as the explosion occurred. The bright red shirt that he loved to wear on his days off was covered in blue and green spots. No one said anything as he took in the sight of the mess. 

After a moment, he breathed out, “....Mum’s going to be furious…,” and Andrea, finally realizing what had just happened, sprang into action.

“No she won’t, because she’ll never find out,” Andrea said, flustered.

“How are we going to clean up all this? There’s no way the paint will come out of that wallpaper.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Andrea said, poking his nose with all the teasing confidence of someone who is trying very, very hard not to panic. She turned to the kitchen behind her, where her three kids still stared at the colorful kitchen.  “Everyone go upstairs, wash up, and change into some clean clothes; your dad’s taking you to the park!”

The kids followed her directions slowly, as if they were still trying to understand how Mia had made such a big mess with a sneeze. As soon as everyone was out of their dirtied clothes, Andrea kicked them outside. Leaning against the inside of the front door, she took a deep breath. Her mother-in-law was out with the neighbors and wouldn’t be back until nine. Her father-in-law was at work, handling a late order. No one was left in the house except her. 

Standing up straight, she rolled up her sleeves and pulled her wand from the enchanted pocket in her pants. Clamping her mouth shut, she began swinging her wand around. The paint, which had started to dry into the wallpaper, pulled itself off the wall and flew into the near empty paint bottles. Andrea continued flicking her wrist as the rest of the mess cleaned itself, leaving no trace. The kitchen done, she hurriedly tiptoed up the stairs, as if any noise would give her magic away to the absent occupants. She repeated the process that was used in the kitchen on the clothes the kids had left on their bedroom floors. Done with the cleaning, Andrea paused before flicking her wrist and sending all the clothes that should be dirty to the laundry room. She washed them. Obviously. 

The work done, she slipped the wand back into its hidden compartment and clapped her hands together.

“And that’s the end of that.”

Except it wasn’t the end of that. A few minutes later, a letter arrived from the ministry asking why magic was being performed in a muggle house. She sent a reply explaining her situation and promised to come in within the week to sort everything out. A week later, Emma accidentally let loose around 20 more frogs than the one she had brought inside. The morning afterwards, Lucas was ensnared in a rapidly overgrowing flowerbed. Fortunately, her in-laws had been out of the house during all of the incidents, but her husband, who had started getting up very early for work and came back early as a result, witnessed parts of all of them. The night after Lucas’s magical manifestation, Andrea was sitting in the living room wondering how she was going to explain all of this. She remembered how her parents had taken the whole ordeal, but her whole family had all been equally uninformed, learning about magic for the first time. Andrea knew about wizards and witches and magic, and she had chosen not to tell her husband and his family. She hadn’t trusted them with that secret.

She spent nearly an hour of scratching out notes on a piece of paper in an attempt of creating some sort of simple explanation when she was interrupted by her husband sitting down next to her. 

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” she responded, and she felt that he wasn’t going to give her any more time to plan out her explanation. The time was now, nothing to lose-- “So--,”

“How do you feel about moving?”

Andrea stopped. This was not the conversation she expected to have, and if it was related to the one she was expecting, she actually had a whole lot to lose.

No response to that question seemed safe, so Andrea just stared at her husband, eyes open too wide and her mouth slightly open, working up and down as she struggled to find words. He stared back at her, but instead of seeming accusatory, or angry, he seemed…

...smug. Like he was one of the few people in on an inside joke and was about to explain it to her. When words continued to escape her, he placed his hand over hers, and his eyes softened a bit.

Andrea didn’t understand at all, and that meant there was only one question to ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” her husband started, leaning back into the chair, “It’s not like we are financially dependent on my parents. It’s convenient staying here, but they seem to be trying to push the kids in directions they don’t want to go, and while they’ve improved since we first got married they still aren’t the nicest to you.”

Andrea could hardly believe what she was hearing. No matter how exasperated or embarrassed her husband was by his parents, he had never even brought up the idea of moving out. She was fairly sure that they would try to cut them off if he did, so she’d never brought it up, no matter how infuriating she found her in-laws and their expectations of total compliance. She smiled a little, and he continued.

“And, while my parents have been out of the house for the strange events that keep happening around our children, and which you are very good at cleaning up, I don’t think that we’ll continue being so lucky.” Her husband shifted, like he was sitting on something uncomfortable. He reached behind himself and rubbed the small of his back. “I don’t think I mind particularly unordinary things, but my parents, as the perfectly ordinary people they are, really don’t. And we should probably get out of their hair.”

“Especially,” he pause, pulling up a small bundle of letters she hadn’t noticed in her near panic from a minute earlier, “Since the kids will actually be learning how to control the unordinary things.”

Andrea took the stack of letters from him. For a moment, she didn’t understand what was unordinary about them, and then she saw the seal on the top left.

The Hogwarts Crest.

The smallest letter was open already, and she pulled it out to read it.

To the Parents of Emma, Mia, and Lucas,

This letter is being sent along with your three children’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry acceptance letters,  
which contain instructions on what materials to bring and when the train to school is scheduled to depart.

As Emma, Mia, and Lucas are listed by the Ministry of Magic as the children of a relative newcomer to magical Great Britain,   
this package contains instructions on how to reach Diagon Alley, where the supplies for the school year may be bought,   
as well as how to access Platform 9 ¾ at King's Cross Station, since the process has caused confusion in many muggle-born families. 

If you have any questions, they may be mailed to the return address on the envelope via owl or Muggle post.   
We look forward to seeing your children at Hogwarts.

Sincerely,

Minerva Mcgonagall  
Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Andrea put the letter down on her lap. Slowly, she turned to her husband. Her heart was hammering.

“I can explain?”

Whatever response he had been expecting, that hadn’t been it. His eyes squeezed shut as he tried to stifle a laugh. He wound up snorting a bit before looking at her.

“You don’t have to?”

“I…,” Andrea glanced down at the letters again, one for them and one for each of the kids. She held them up “Dudley, you don’t have any questions about these?”

“Not really. My cousin went to school there, so me and my parents got a decent understanding of how things work.” Dudley paused for a moment, his smile disappearing. “But my parents really, really didn’t treat him well because of it, and I don’t want to test how they’d react to Emma, Mia, or Lucas going. Much less all three.”

Andrea blinked. She definitely couldn’t see her in-laws reacting well to the fact there were wizards in the family. That was one of the reasons she didn’t tell them in the first place.

And if Dudley knew what magic was then there was really only one question that needed to be answered.

“Where were you thinking about moving?”

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this despite no cannon characters being tagged, I applaud you and thank you. I felt that, after the reaction the class had, I should post this for others to see. I hope you enjoyed it. There is a small possibility that I might write a bit more for this story, but for now this the entire thing.
> 
> Critique is welcome, though I actually still haven't finished ever book in the series (I saw the Deathly Hallows movies, which I've heard left out a lot) and I didn't really grow up with the books, so if I messed up something magic related then I honestly have no idea.


End file.
